Hello fellow Developers,
As we recently announced [1], we have been working on a complete
re-implementation of dput [2]. As of today, the package is available in
Debian Unstable [3] ready for early adoptors.
We'd like to encourage everyone to test the new look and feel of dput,
and, if you're interested, contribute code, documentation or ideas. We
are hosted in collab-maint, and we mean it. Visit us and commit patches
if you like! We believe the code is mature enough to be used by a wide
audience, but there is still a chance unusual dput setups may depend on
unimplemented features. If this is the case, patches are very welcome.
If you're more into IRC, we idle in oftc/#torabora
Advantages
----------
* A complete and modern rewrite of the entire dput functionality, and
native support for (real) SFTP
* Support for pluggable and dynamic pre- and post upload hooks, which
preform more complex sanity checks before the upload, on a per profile
(host) basis.
* new checks, which can check for such things as mistaken uploads to
unstable (e.g. package built with sbuild -c unstable targeting
experimental), or mistaken sourceful (or non-sourceful) uploads. These
are pre-beta.
* dcut support, including management of DM permissions [4]
* Better support for well known Non-Debian distributions. In particular,
we support Ubuntu PPAs out of the box. In addition, other setups may
be supported via extentions. We also welcome downstream contributors
to dput-ng's upstream.
Known Limitations
-----------------
* We deliberately do not support some rare dput configuration settings
by design choice. In particular, dinstall post-upload support, and
rsync based uploads (which eventually is a special treatment of SCP
uploads in dput traditional)
* We don't support progress bars yet (but it's planned)
* Some hooks are considered highly experimental
Quick Migration Howto
---------------------
You may apt-get install dput-ng and use it as a drop-in replacement to
the older dput package. It will provide the same executables and replace
dput. It is not possible by choice to use both tools in parallel. The
command line interface emulates the old interface for dput. The dcut
command line interface is not call compatible, but provides more
features and (we claim) an easier to use interface.
We have a dual-configuration stack support. We parse and support dput.cf
configuration files. Eventually you should just be able to re-use all
files you created. However, we recommend to remove the pristine global
/etc/dput.cf file, but we are fine if you prefer to keep it.
Aside, we do also support a new JSON based configuration file format
overcoming syntactical limitations of the INI style syntax (e.g. express
and override list values). Some configuration keys can be used in the
new-style JSON configuration only (e.g. if you wanted to override hook
configurations).
Currently, editing the JSON by hand is the only way to correctly setup
your dput install. A tool (dirt) will be ready soonish to later to help
ease configuration.
You can use either choice among configuration styles: old style, new
style or anything mixed up in between.
Our Relation with Dput (Traditional)
------------------------------------
We were in contact Y Giridhar Appaji Nag regarding dput and our relation
with it. He welcomes our efforts and we do not share hard feelings on
either side. We agreed to co-exist with each other for now and we will
caefully and slowly aim to supersede dput in the long-run. For now, no
particular roadmap to deprecate the traditional dput nor are there any
efforts to do so at this time.
Contributing
------------------
We're currently seeking contributors to add new hooks (pre-upload checks
and post-upload routines), new upload methods we forgot (or haven't
implemented), and general bugfixing.
In addition, work iternationalizing and translating strings would be
nice (or advice on doing so properly).
Finally, Documentation (http://dput.rtfd.org/) is always great, and
there's tons to document. Doc changes are extremely welcome.
Please feel free to push (sane) changes to dputng's master branch
(please stay away from release/* and tags), and be sure to add yourself
to AUTHORS on your *FIRST* commit. If you're unsure, please feel free to
push a branch to features/* or bugs/* on git.d.o[5] and ask for a
review.
To those who have contributed already -- thank you!
We look forward to your (constructive) feedback,
Paul & Arno
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=691624
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/dput.html
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/dput-ng.html
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/09/msg00008.html
[5] http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/dputng.git
--
.''`. Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org>
: :' : Proud Debian Developer
`. `'` 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352 D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87
`- http://people.debian.org/~paultag
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